Recently, progress has been made in streamlining mail sortation. For example, U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60/589,634, filed Jul. 21, 2004 is incorporated herein by reference. That previous invention used a folder/divider system for escorting mail through a sortation system. One aspect of this progress has been an increased use of electronic databases to record destinations of mail pieces, and to associate those destinations with respective folder/dividers. This electronic data regarding the destination addresses of surface mail has not yet been exploited at the delivery end, after a carrier has obtained sorted mail from a sorting system.
The posts around the world are very interested in ways for making mail carriers more efficient. The USPS recently engaged four suppliers to develop methods of merging flats and letters mail streams and wrapping all the mail for each delivery point in a packet. This initiative was intended to reduce the amount of time each carrier must spend manually sorting mail for the route each morning before leaving the DDU (Destination Delivery Unit=local post office), and reduce “fingering time” in which the carrier determines how many pieces are to be delivered to each address. Fingering time varies between 20 and 45 seconds per address.
Mailers and mail recipients have indicated displeasure with the USPS' plans to bundle or wrap mail for each address into packets. If the USPS heeds these warnings, they will lose some of the efficiency because the fingering time will be not be reduced as much as planned.
Additionally, posts face another issue related to carrier efficiency. Since carriers work a five day week, and mail must be delivered six days a week, at least one day each week, a substitute carrier must be used on each route to sort and deliver the mail. Also, when a carrier is on vacation, or calls in sick, substitutes must be used. The substitutes are not as familiar with the route as the assigned carrier, so they take longer to sort the mail, learn the route, and finger the mail while in transit.